Monday, September 02, 2013
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Anastázie [Pavlivna] Hagenová née Hryšajová (*1985), known as Wiska, is a Ukrainian-born porn actress who stopped working in the field two years ago and she no longer finds the job fulfilling. (However, I was told that she shot another film, Vizi Solitari 2, in Italy half a year ago.)

I watched some Ukrainian officials who screamed that she was the only source of porn that the country was producing and therefore she had to be stopped. So she was at risk that they would arrest her or something like that for her past work that is perfectly legal in much of the West.

In similar respects, Czechia is an indisputable part of the Western Europe – the people's opinions about similar topics are comparably relaxed to the opinions of the Dutchmen if not more so. However, we also have some understanding for the very different values of the Eastern nations.

Because of the shared Slavic cultural ancestry and some Russian classes many of us would have to attend as kids, we partially understand Ukrainian. Still, their way of thinking is so different. However, the difference isn't something that would make us hate them. It may be more accurate to say that they remind us of our grandparents etc.

Czechia has had so many porn actresses that no one would bother to remember all their names. No one simply cares – except for the consumers who just want to watch something of the sort. She could actually face an immensely tough and numerous competition over here so it's a good idea that she stopped with that job, especially because of her three sons.

She found a tiny Czech village of Libice – with 50 inhabitants, about 30 miles South of Prague or 50 miles East of Pilsen – to be her new home. You may watch the video above to check that her house seems incredibly modest for a relatively famous porn star. Sometimes in the recent year, she ran out of money and Berkat.CZ along with both Catholic and Evangelic churches in Czechia actually collected some money for her family.

A month ago or so, she was refused political asylum once again – the verdict said that her application didn't contain a sufficient justification; I would probably give her one if it were up to me. At any rate, after several failed attempts, she won the permanent legal residence in the Czech Republic which is pretty much equivalent, anyway.

The children in particular don't deserve to undergo a childhood of prosecution just because their mother's job is found controversial by their very conservative compatriots. On the other hand, I also respect the opinions of the Ukrainians who dislike such things – for various reasons, sometimes even understandable moral reasons. The Czech Republic behaved in the way I find appropriate – not to aggressively interfere with the internal affairs of Ukraine and its policies that are needed for the happiness of the bulk of the nation; but help some folks who might really suffer if they stayed there even though they don't deserve it.

I actually believe that she must be a good mother. The children may be gradually prepared for the day when they find their mom's videos on the Internet for the first time but given the fact that almost no one is really shocked by such things over here, they probably won't suffer even for an hour. The family still looks "Eastern" in a sense – it reflects the relative poverty of the East. The youngest baby was already born in Czechia and looks almost indistinguishable from Czech babies.

Quite generally, I would describe the Ukrainian minority in Czechia to be problem-free. They're clearly not "almost just like us" which is a fair description for the Slovaks but they're compatible. The years when we would know about these folks because of the ex-Soviet mafia that shoots someone every week belong to the history books, too. Most of them keep an amusing Eastern accent – somewhat softer and with much more non-uniform stress on various syllables than Czech tends to have (which, I believe, must be correlated to the Czechs' pragmatism) – but there's no doubt that most of these people are being fully integrated.

Tymoshenko's relatives have been using Czechia as a refugee camp for years, too.

This also brings me to the Russian bill banning homosexual propaganda that was approved unanimously. Most people in the West don't get it. In fact, there are many places in the West where they would unanimously adopt a bill saying that everyone must pay lip service to gays every day ;-) i.e. everyone must constantly commit a crime according to the Russian law.

Some people in the West react intolerantly (I've seen several rants, even in Physics Today, attacking Russia for the bill) but I think theirs is a sort of cultural bigotry, too. A democratic nation has the right to decide what its children are being taught at school, and so on. If they believe that homosexuality is wrong and shouldn't be publicized, it's their right. If someone suffers because of these beliefs, help him or her. But you shouldn't terrorize or attempt to reeducate a whole nation just because you believe that its value system is wrong. One could argue rather convincingly that the Western tolerance towards all these symptoms contradicting the traditional family has led to a certain deterioration. One could also argue otherwise. It's a subtle thing that can't be convincingly settled one way or another.

I have nothing against gays but the "homosexualism" ideology, using one of the words coined by the Czech ex-president Klaus, the program to gain advantages for gays just because they're gays, the decision to stupidly celebrate and boast about something that didn't used to be celebrated at all, quite on the contrary, is just another example of political correctness run amok. Moreover, I think that to dismiss a whole nation of Russians – and many more nations – just because they're more socially conservative is a more dramatic example of a cultural bigotry than their own "homophobia".

Finally, I must mention a physics revelation that is indirectly related to the topic of this blog entry. Over the years, Tommaso Dorigo has said many things that many of us considered to be anti-supersymmetric rants. But it turns out that it was a huge misunderstanding. What Tommaso Dorigo actually meant whenever he said that supersymmetry got sc**wd by the LHC was that he got sexually aroused as soon as he looked at an exclusion diagram from the LHC. When the LHC experiments penetrate into the supersymmetric parameter space, he just calls it "screwing", whatever the verb means (I have no idea).

As Tommaso Dorigo must realize as soon as the arousal fades away, SUSY is doing very well.

Of course that I do. Russia is democracy because the leaders are being elected pretty much just like in any other democracy. Putin and pals are at the top because they actually do enjoy the strongest public support - in fact, it's a degree of public support that you don't see in virtually any Western country.

If you doubt that Putin has a support of the majority of Russians, you don't have the slightest clue about the world of politics.

I am not very fond of a “full democracy”, I actually prefer constitutional monarchy ;-) It would take too long to explain fully but is should be really clear from what I wrote earlier.

I do agree that the British post-war establishment turned out to be a dreadful failure (and the same thing happened in much of Europe) but the reasons, as I see them, are complicated and rather typical of the last century.

To put if very briefly, at around the end of the second world war the membership of the establishment underwent a revolution. The old establishment consisted of the old landed aristocracy, the military (essentially a subset of the former), industrialists, financiers who were mostly people who dealt with the real world, had a practical knowledge of other countries and cultures and few illusions. In Britain the collapse of the Empire discredited this old ruling class (in continental Europe there were somewhat different reasons). By the late 1960s, when I arrived in the UK, the “upper class twit” and a reactionary colonel were figures of fun. The people who dominated the new establishment knew the world primarily from books, they condemned the past (especially the Empire), they despised the ignorant masses, and they believed in “progress’ represented, above all, by themselves. Only such people could have conceived the absurd notion that importing to a country such as the UK millions of people from the former empire (and particularly Muslims) was a way to the great future that they dreamt about.

I am fairly Euro-sceptic (more so in my British incarnation than in my Polish one) but I don’t think you can blame Europe for the British immigration problems. The responsibility for this lies elsewhere.

In any case, I am not too keen on your DNA based solution (and it’s not just because of the way it would affect myself, since although I like my British passport and Oxford, which is my UK base, I have no desire to live there and my daughter lives in the US). If the British DNA has remained stable in spite of the various Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans (not counting the Jews, the Poles etc), then it should not be able to survive the current wave. Culture is much more important and there is no more serious threat then that posed Islam. But making the genome the issue is, in my opinion, very conterproductive.

Now that I am on this topic I would like to mention something that Lubos may find interesting, since he sometimes refers to genetic affinity of the Czechs with other Slavs, particularly the Russians. Well, I recently read a careful statistical study of the genetics of the population of European Russia. The European Russian population is actually quite heterogeneous because in addition to the basic Slavic genes it contains two other significant groups: the Finnish and the Komi. So the Russians can be divided into several quite clearly distinct groups. The authors then compared their result with those for several other Europen nations, including Germans, Czechs and Poles. The result is as I would have expected and as you can see on the graph below: the German, Czech and Polish DNA is practically indistinguishable. This has been confirmed by other studies (there was recently an article about it in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, which stated the same thing, but also pointed out that the populations of all these three countries contain substantial characteristics of DNA associated with the Jews, even though their Jewish populations are now virtually non-existent.

So as far as DNA is concerned, the Czechs are now closer to the Germans then to the Russian average, even though this does not necessarily coincide with their cultural sentiments.

“… Czechs are now closer to the Germans then to theRussian average, even though this does not necessarily coincide with theircultural sentiments.”

Oh, it does coincide but the tie between them is that of correlation,not causation. DNA is overrated while culture and its offspring ideology areunderrated. The Czech Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism of the 19thcentury were romantic nonsense.

There is nothing wrong with this. For what it is worth, there's nothing wrong with actually experimenting with or marrying a cousin. There are some countries and a little over half of US states where the bigotry against marriage equality extends to preventing first cousins from marrying, but the are many places where marrying a first cousin is legal and common.